Before I post about more unseen Star Wars stuff, I thought I’d do a bit of follow-up to some that I’ve already shown. One of our biggest heartbreaks in designing stuff for Phantom Menace promotions was getting all the way to prototype on a big Jabba the Hutt beanbag, but having it rejected for cost/size issues.

Keep in mind when looking at this that it was just the initial attempt. We would have had a few more rounds of refinement to get it as close as we could. The one that got made was created by a domestic beanbag maker in the traditional manner, with a sort of textured fabric for Jabba’s "skin" and very simplistic vector graphics (created by Steve Ross, shown next to Jabba) printed on it for the details. Originally we tried to have the fabric airbrushed for a more realistic effect, but this proved to be too problematic to reproduce, and we had concerns about the durability in the long term. This was not our first attempt though.

I’m going to digress a bit here to explain why I am showing this "prototype". A lot of times collectors complain about how paint jobs are off on toys, or they are off-model compared to the source, or the articulation has been put in wrong, or any number of things that they can’t understand how someone missed it. What they don’t realize is that many times these "mistakes" were not there in the original sculpts or paint masters supplied to the factories, but showed up during production itself. Due to the high costs involved and the strict timetables, if it was caught early enough there might be a running change. But most of the time these things are just let alone if it does not greatly impact the licensor or safety. 

The reason for this is that the Chinese engineers and artisans do not see the source material as we see it, at least in my experience. This is the reason I had to actually go live in China and show them exactly what I wanted. I found that they were great at copying a 3D object to another 3D object, but couldn’t seem to make the connection between 2D art and a 3D object. They have fantastically talented sculptors and painters, but they need very detailed engineering blueprints, exploded views, and everything to be perfect in terms of measurements to create what you want. And even then the process needs to be refined a few times to correct for problems in translation. This is why you need line designers who really know what they’re doing, especially when the sculpting is being done at the factory level and not domestically.

So back to the Jabba Beanbag. While I was staying in China working on the Star Wars life-size characters I was also overseeing our other promo items that were in production, like the Star Wars bomber jacket, Lightsaber Flashlight, and assorted trinkets like watches, magnets, and puzzles. Once the Jabba Beanbag got the greenlight to go further, I sent our concept art to the factory to make an initial sample for costing. Their only instruction was to come as close to the concept art as possible (for these types of "never been done before" projects, it’s always good to see what they can do first, before trying to reinvent the wheel). We also included a lot of shots of Jabba from the movie for reference. When I went over to their offices the next week, this is what they showed me:

Yeah, that was my reaction, too. They seriously thought this matched the concept art very well. After a few more discussions, we realized that for this specific project it would probably be better to find a beanbag manufacturer and go from there. Even so, there were a lot of discussions and experiments to get us where we were at the picture at top. But hopefully this helps explain why you really need someone who knows what they are doing to daily communicate with the factories to make sure that they are on the right track. It’s not that the skill isn’t there, but the common viewpoint is sometimes lacking.

I have a few more really crazy examples that I’ll try to dig up, to further illustrate the point, this time with actual sculpts. As an added bonus, here is a picture I took when I was goofing around of our life-size Yoda sporting a pair of Jar Jar eyes. Makes him look kind of a like a Gremlin!

A couple of things about this Yoda; one of the cooler moments of my life was standing around Lucas Licensing at Skywalker Ranch with Karl Myers of Gentle Giant, right after we were given the surprise go-ahead to make Yoda based on the positive feedback from the Darth Maul and Jar Jar prototypes. We asked if they had any reference of his new Phantom Menace look and they walked into George’s office there, picked up the bronze casting of the new Gary Pollard sculpt that was made for George Lucas and Stuart Freeborn and handed it to us and said "why don’t you just cast this?"  So our Yoda was basically an identical duplicate of the actual sculpt used for the puppet. Unfortunately, the puppet didn’t look too much like the classic Yoda (I always thought it looked kind of like Anthony Hopkins) and for the next two films they went back to a look closer to that of his first appearance. Our Yoda was also not really life-size: Pepsi thought that his real height (28") didn’t have enough presence for an in-store display so we scaled it up to 36", which created some headaches in trying to figure out new dimensions for his feet, cane, hands, clothes, etc. But it still came out neat enough for a mass produced item! And Lucas Licensing was awesome throughout the whole process (got to give props!).

So that’s the story More tomorrow! 

Pictures cannot be used without express written permission.

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OK, so I’ve been away from the blog for awhile. Work has been kicking my ass, big time.

Lots to blog about, lots more unseen concepts to see, and lots to talk about concerning upcoming toy news that we can’t speak of just yet.

In the meantime, I’m not sure anything I could write about can possible top…a monkey on a motorcycle!

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Over the past 15 or so years every new superhero toyline that springs up has been anointed as "the new Super Powers" by someone or other. I’ve always argued against it in every case, or just plain laughed it off. While Super Powers might not be able to compare to today’s manufacturing techniques that allow more detailed sculpts and paint jobs, and single figures might pale in comparison to a single modern sculpt, as a whole the line has never been surpassed in my eyes.

Because the whole line has always had as its key strength one characteristic that has been unmatched since: consistency. Consistency in scale, consistency in style, consistency in features and articulation. More than most line, you immediately know when you see a Super Powers figure just what collection it is part of.  And then you have the fringe benefits of the line being well thought out: every character can easily stand on it’s own, the action features make sense and are hidden, and pretty much every major character was included before the line’s untimely demise. Top it off with the added bonus of no variants and all new crazy characters added to the mix, and Super Powers was the proverbial lightning striking.

And as we all know, lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice. And up until now, no other line has come close to matching these criteria. Yes, I said up until NOW. But now, after all these years, I finally do think we’re seeing the true successor to Super Powers: Mattel’s DC Universe Classics. True, Mattel has stumbled around with the DC license for the past few years (they’re really stretching out that learning curve!) but after finally landing the master toy license they seem to have hit their stride. Although we won’t discuss the JLU line, which people somehow equate to Super Powers greatness based on depth of character alone. But I digress…

So why DCUC? Well, a huge part of the reason is the sheer greatness of the driving force behind the line: the Four Horsemen. We all already know that the Horsemen do a great job on everything they touch, but this line looks to be their crowning glory. How much of the direction being taken is their doing, and if Mattel plots out every little detail or just stands back and gets out of their way I don’t know. And to be honest, I don’t care as long as the direction seen so far stays that way! In any case, even if we didn’t know that the Horsemen were huge Super Powers fans, their work surely tells us this fact: the versions of Lex Luthor and Brainiac that have been released in the earlier Superman line are sporting their Super Powers togs. And of course we know that Mattel’s DC man on the scene, Scott "ToyGuru" Neitlich keeps a Super Powers checklist at his desk for comparison. And really, that new Hal Jordan Green Lantern figure sealed the deal for me. The Super Powers Green Lantern has always been (in my mind) the perfect realization of a comic character in figure form. It just stick outs from the pack for some reason. But the new DCUC Hal is just…awesome. If the final product looks like the prototype, it may be my new favorite figure.

And speaking of the character selection, with 15 characters down and only 19 more to go they are nearly halfway through the Super Powers roster with only the first 3 of 5 waves for 2008. And it’s doubtful that they can/will make Samurai, Golden Pharoah, or Cyclotron due to licensing issues so they really have only 16 more characters until they match exactly the Super Powers line-up. But outside of that line-up they’ve already produced iconic versions of many, many characters that Kenner never came close to touching, like Clayface and Etrigan. And dare I hope one day the Horsemen are given free reign to insert their own characters into the line from time to time? Probably not. But by the time the license expires in 2012 (if it isn’t renewed for some reason) we’ll have seen 150+ unique figures in this line. All in scale. All in the same style.

All completely consistent.

And that, my friends, is why for the first time I look forward to having a unified display to rival the only one that has been near to my heart for almost 20 years. God bless you, Four Horsemen. God bless you, Mattel. Now hurry up and fix JLU, you bastards!

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So I got this book not too long ago as a gift: Boy’s Toys by Jed Novick. It’s a kind of odd book, wanting to be a primer of the popular toys of the 60s & 70s, with a bit of the 80s thrown in. What it comes off as, though, is one person’s memories of said toys…with maybe a quick trip to Wikipedia to fill in the gaps. No toy line gets more than a two-page spread (and these are tiny pages) so the information is very scattershot. Couple that to having BAD information and the fact that many of the pictures are of wrong items or out of date ones (example: a 1996 X-Wing supposedly being a 1978 one) I can’t recommend this book to pretty much anyone. And since a picture is worth a thousand words, etc., just take a look at this page to see a representative example of the whole book. Note: Marvel Legends figures aren’t mentioned once in the entire book. (Click on pic for bigger image).

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